On 11 December 2010 17:36, Tony Sidaway
<tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I know everybody is tired of hearing me bang on
about this, but the
whole "Featured article" edifice has always seemed dubious to me. It
seems to concentrate our limited resources on a tiny number of
articles, and the emphasis has always been more on dotting eyes and
crossing tees than improving overall quality of coverage.
As far as I know, only a small minority of Wikipedians work on getting
articles featured. There are plenty that like to create lots of
articles that are just of reasonable quality. There are plenty that
like to go around making small improvements to lots of existing
articles. A big part of Wikipedia's success is our diverse community.
There are lots of jobs that need doing (including dotting i's and
crossing t's) and everyone can choose for themselves which job they
want to do and (rather amazingly) we end up with almost every job
getting done (there are a few backlogs that build up, but relative to
the size of the project they are pretty small).
Like what goes on the Main Page, featured articles is pretty much a snake
pit (IMO), but a small group gets a lot out of both of them, so it's
fine, but not central. You gotta give the devil his due.
Fred
User:Fred Bauder